When President Obama came into office, one obvious improvement from the old regime was the appointment of Julius Genachowski as Federal Communications Commission chairman, who has been a prominent supporter of net neutrality: the idea that all Internet traffic should be handled equally, and that internet service providers should not be able to do things like slow down the speeds of torrents or provide improved service to websites at the expense of others.

Genachowski has been murmuring that he’d be pursuing net neutrality legislation for awhile, but now, he’s lifted the pen to paper, and begun drafting rules that would require ISPs to remain net neutral and treat all Internet traffic equally. The draft will be open for public comment until January 14th.

Needless to say, though, not everyone is happy about this. Senator John McCain has already introduced legislation to block the FCC’s move, describing it as “onerous federal regulation.” Called the “Internet Freedom Act of 2009,” McCain said that his legilation will keep the Internet “free from government control.”

Certainly, net neutrality isn’t a sure win. For one thing, net neutrality might simply encourage ISPs to bill users more for bandwidth as their pipes become clogged with high bandwidth traffic like video streaming. And from a libertarian perspective, McCain has a point: in theory, ISPs that hobble the traffic of torrent and video sites would lose out financially to ISPs that don’t. But practically speaking, that’s not guaranteed to work, especially if ISPs all get in on traffic blocking together.

Regardless, this debate now seems to be split down predictable party lines. One thing’s for sure: this is a better application of the FCC’s energy than trying to fine blogger’s for non-disclosure.

Reader Comments

McCain is probably right. The Marxist in DC want to own everything. They already own 2 or the 3 big US auto makers. They want to ruin I mean run health care, right into the ground. Fascist SOBs.

Kuyosuke

regulas you are right, the Whitehouse wants to run everything their way, i mean why not, it would be more money,income and power to them….

Derek

You know, as a Republican, I’m very torn on this. On the one hand, I’m skeptical of more government regulation on anything, but on the other hand, many of our bigger corporations have proven in recent years that without regulation, they’d gladly not only play with matches but bathe in gasoline while doing so — in someone else’s house. OK, bad metaphor. The POINT is, as much as I don’t want the government being the “gatekeeper” of what I can see or not see on the internet, I’m just as angry about the possibility of Cox / Comcast / etc. making themselves the gatekeeper, by charging content providers premiums to make sure that their content gets delivered at the best possible speed (which, in the long run, will mean reasonable speed, as websites and other content become more and more data heavy).

Let’s face it: this is the ol’ “protection scheme” with a new name. ISP’s go to a content provider, such as a news site, and say, “Well now, CNN, you’ve got a mighty fine thing going here, mighty fine. Articles, video, audio, all streamed 24-hours a day to your customers. It’d be a real SHAME if it were to suddenly, say, slow down to a trickle so painful that no one would watch it. Oh, don’t give us that look! We’re your friends! We want to HELP you! Just pay us for our ‘premium service,’ and we’ll make sure that nothing gets in the way of your data.” And we all know — or should know — where that leads: companies like CNN or Fox News (*shudder*, at both) are big enough to pay, and they will, eager to make sure that they stay on top. But then, smaller news sites — and other, small non-news sites, for that matter — won’t be able to pay, so their data WILL slow down to a trickle, and most viewers WILL give up trying to watch them, and just watch CNN and Fox instead. Is that REALLY what “freedom” means?

I’m going to have to write to my Senator (who IS John McCain).

zerocool

The FCC is NOT trying to own the Internet. There needs to be some form of air-tight legislation in the wild west of the Internet.

If the ISPs are left unchecked, we’ll all eventually be living in a world where you have to pay a toll to see a heavily visited website like Google. Or, think about a future where websites are no longer on equal footing. Example: NPR.org gets less bandwidth and responds slower than CNN.com because CNN is in bed with Time Warner Cable.

This will happen with or without net-neutrality. There needs to be MORE thought done here! Bandwagoners are not invisible to the eyes of these predatorial big businesses.